Revenue generating features in Pidgin

[Matthew Wardrop]

There is merit in what Phil has to say, and his ideas were not entirely
unconsidered by myself before I sent in my email.

The lure, if I may call it so, of extra money is always enticing... but,
I suppose I have become very used to the absence of these money-making
drives in my open source environments.

It is my personal preference (which I know is as light as a feather)
that such things are not implemented. Pidgin is beautifully simple, and
I would feel (almost) violated if I had to have advertisements or search
bars in and about my conversation. I would not mind if it were done as a
plugin, which I would be able to disable, but would that be enough for
About.com?

I do not know if my views represent that of a broader sweep of the user
base, but here is me hoping.

Regardless of your decision, I think you have done a wonderful job with
pidgin. But even so, I am not sure I would be so keen on it thereafter.

Kind Regards,
Matthew

On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 10:19 +0000, Phil Hannent wrote:
> Matthew Wardrop wrote:
> > I am no developer (of pidgin), but one of the main reasons I use pidgin
> > is because it is unencumbered with advertisements and other proprietary
> > "features" like these.
> I am also not a pidgin developer.
> 
> The counter argument is that money can help make things happen.
> 
> A revenue stream could lead to someone being paid to improve certain things 
> which might not get attention, it could also pay for servers and/or for 
> developer conferences.
> 
> Ask the users if they would like a full time paid developer working on pidgin 
> and optional adverts or no full time developer and no adverts.
> 
> Personally I do not see a lot of value in a search bar (option 1) as its not 
> part of an instant messenger, however relevant adverts (option 2) or 
> highlighting a text in chat and searching on that could be.
> 
> If the revenue generated was passed back to the user would users be more 
> inclined to accept such a feature?
> 
> Regards
> Phil Hannent
> 
> 
> 
> 
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